Download or read book Compositionality Context and Semantic Values written by Robert J. Stainton and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-11-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.
Download or read book Compositionality Context and Semantic Values written by Robert J. Stainton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are natural languages genuinely compositional? What roles does context play in linguistic communication, and by what means? In particular, does context interfere with the compositional determination of truth conditions? What meanings should theorists assign to sentences if compositionality is to be retained? These are the central questions of this important volume of new philosophical essays in honour of Ernie Lepore.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality written by Markus Werning and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 765 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.
Download or read book Context Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism written by Gerhard Preyer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main." - editors' preface.
Download or read book Essays on Semantic Content and Context sensitivity written by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis comprises three foundational studies on the topics named in its title, together with an introduction. Ch. 1 argues against a popular combination of views in the philosophy of language: Propositionality, which says that the semantic values of natural language sentences (relative to contexts) are the propositions they express (in those contexts) and Compositionality, which says that the semantic value of a complex expression of a natural language (in a context) is determined by the semantic values its immediate constituents have (in that same context) together with their syntactic mode of combination. Ch. 1 argues that the Naïve Picture is inconsistent with the presence of variable-binding in natural languages. Ch. 2 criticizes the strategy of using "operator arguments" to establish relativist conclusions such as: that the truth values of propositions vary with time (Time Relativism) or that they vary with location (Location Relativism). Operator arguments purport to derive the conclusion that propositions vary in truth value along some parameter P from the premise that there are, in some language, sentential operators that operate on or "shift" the P parameter. I identify two forms of operator argument, offer a reconstruction of each, and I argue that both they rely on an implausible, coarse-grained conception of propositions. Ch. 3 is an assessment of the prospects for semantic internalism. It argues, first, that to accommodate Putnam's famous Twin Earth examples, an internalist must maintain that narrow semantic content determines different extensions relative to agents and times. Second, that the most thoroughly worked out version of semantic internalism - the epistemic two-dimensionalism (E2D) of David Chalmers - can accommodate the original Twin Earth thought experiments but is refuted by similar thought experiments that involve temporally or spatially symmetric agents.
Download or read book Foundational Issues written by Markus Werning and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to bring together the diverging approaches. They assemble a collection of original papers that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well-chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, and philosophers.
Download or read book Approaches to Meaning written by Daniel Gutzmann and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The basic claims of traditional truth-conditional semantics are that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is connected to the truth of that sentence in a situation, and that the meaning of the sentence is derived compositionally from the semantic values meaning of its constituents and the rules that combine them. Both claims have been subject to an intense debate in linguistics and philosophy of language. The original research papers collected in this volume test the boundaries of this classic view from a linguistic and a philosophical point of view by investigating the foundational notions of composition, values and interpretation and their relation to the interfaces to other disciplines. They take the classical theories one step further and closer to a realistic semantic theory that covers speaker’s intentions, the knowledge of discourse participants, meaning of fiction and literature, as well as vague and paradoxical utterances. Ede Zimmermann is a pioneering researcher in semantics whose students, friends, and colleagues have collected in this volume an impressive set of studies at the interfaces of semantics. How do meanings interact with the context and with intentions and beliefs of the people conversing? How do meanings interact with other meanings in an extended discourse? How can there be paradoxical meanings? Researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, anyone interested in foundational and empirical issues of meaning, will find inspiration and instruction in this wonderful volume. Kai von Fintel, MIT Department of Linguistics
Download or read book Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology written by James A. Hampton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.
Download or read book Compositionality in Formal Semantics written by Barbara H. Partee and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compositionality in Formal Semantics is a collection of Barbara Partee’s papers that have been influential in the field but are not readily available and includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her thinking and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. Brings together, in one volume, influential but difficult to find papers by one of the most important researchers in formal semantics. Includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her research and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. Discusses critical themes in semantic theory.
Download or read book Direct Compositionality written by Chris Barker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007-03 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality" which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis for twenty years, contributors from both sides of the debate draw on examples from a wide range of languages and discuss the place of direct compositionality in generative grammar.
Download or read book Compositional Semantics written by Pauline I. Jacobson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of English. Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic interpretation. Alongside thisapproach, the author also presents a competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical Form. She develops parallel treatments of a variety of phenomena from both points of view with detailedcomparisons. The book begins with simple and fundamental concepts and gradually builds a more complex fragment, including analyses of more advanced topics such as focus, negative polarity, intensionality, and quantified logic. Exercises are provided throughout, alongside open-ended questions for students to consider. The book provides a rigorous foundation in formal analysis and model theoretic semantics and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophyof language, and related fields.
Download or read book Problems of Compositionality written by Zoltán Gendler Szabó and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical discussion of the principle of compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and its structure. The aim of this book is to clarify what is meant by this principle, to show that its traditional justification is insufficient, and to discuss some of the problems that have to be addressed before a new attempt can be made to justify it.
Download or read book The Architecture of Context and Context Sensitivity written by Tadeusz Ciecierski and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses foundational issues of context-dependence and indexicality, which are at the center of the current debate within the philosophy of language. Topics include the scope of context-dependency, the nature of content and the character of input data of cognitive processes relevant for the interpretation of utterances. There's also coverage of the role of beliefs and intentions as contextual factors, as well as the validity of arguments in context-sensitive languages. The contributions consider foundational issues regarding context-sensitivity from three different, yet related, perspectives on the phenomenon of context-dependence: representational, structural, and functional. The contributors not only address the representational, structural and/or functional problems separately but also study their mutual connections, thus furthering the debate and bringing competing approaches closer to unification and consensus. This text appeals to students and researchers within the field. This is a very useful collection of essays devoted to the roles of context in the study of language. Its essays provide a useful overview of the current debates on this topic, and they put forth novel contributions that will undoubtedly be of relevance for the development of all areas in philosophy and linguistics interested in the notion of context. Stefano Predelli Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Download or read book Brevity written by Laurence Goldstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brevity in conversation is a window to the workings of the mind. People use ellipsis and various kinds of pragmatic enrichment, keyed to the particular conversational setting, to express concisely what they mean. Distinguished linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists here say how.
Download or read book Language in Context written by Jason Stanley and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.
Download or read book Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics written by John Searle and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.
Download or read book Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language written by Gillian Russell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 941 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, charting its key ideas and movements, and addressing contemporary research and enduring questions in the philosophy of language. Unique to this Companion is clear coverage of research from the related disciplines of formal logic and linguistics, and discussion of the applications in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. Organized thematically, the Companion is divided into seven sections: Core Topics; Foundations of Semantics; Parts of Speech; Methodology; Logic for Philosophers of Language; Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy; and Historical Perspectives. Comprised of 70 never-before-published essays from leading scholars--including Sally Haslanger, Jeffrey King, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Rae Langton, Kit Fine, John MacFarlane, Jeff Pelletier, Scott Soames, Jason Stanley, Stephen Stich and Zoltan Gendler Szabo--the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language promises to be the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for students and scholars alike.
